Australian filmmaker Adrian Chiarella’s debut feature Leviticus has arrived as one of the year’s most critically praised horror films, earning a 93% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and an 83 from Metacritic since Neon acquired it out of Sundance in January for around $5 million. Released in the United States on June 19, the film places a supernatural entity at the center of a queer coming-of-age story set in a deeply religious bush town in regional Victoria — a monster conjured not from folklore but from conversion therapy.
The film’s central conceit is surgically precise: two teenage boys, Naim (Joe Bird) and Ryan (Stacy Clausen), fall in love and are subsequently subjected to a ritual by the town’s religious community. The hex it produces spawns a demonic entity that takes the form of whoever its target desires most, hunting them down with escalating violence.
The harder they try to feel nothing for each other, the more dangerous their situation becomes. Chiarella, who heard passages from the Book of Leviticus quoted against him at a religious school at age 13, has described the premise as a literalization of what conversion therapy practitioners actually do: attempt to make gay people afraid of their own desire.
The film’s most discussed creative choice is its refusal to give its parents a redemption arc. Naim’s mother Arlene, played with careful moral ambiguity by Mia Wasikowska — who also served as executive producer — loves her son and yet enables the ritual that endangers him. “Having seen a lot of films about conversion therapy, they all seem to give the parents this miraculously redemptive ending,” Chiarella told The Hollywood Reporter.
The film ends with Naim and Ryan boarding a bus out of town together, abandoning their families — a conclusion Chiarella has framed as both truthful and cautiously hopeful. The entity, he has noted, doesn’t disappear: trauma, like the monster, may never fully die.
The project was developed through VicScreen’s Originate initiative and financed through Screen Australia and Causeway Films, the production company behind Talk to Me — in which Bird also appeared. Frank Ocean personally authorized the use of his song “Self Control” over the end credits, the first time his music has been licensed for a film in seven years.
